Archive for December, 2005

YOUR real estate broker can find you the right home, the right buyer, the right mortgage broker, the right contractor and the right architect. But how about Mr. or Ms. Right?

Ali Kleeblatt would say yes. Her real estate agent, David Dubin of the Corcoran Group, introduced Ms. Kleeblatt, a 30-year-old psychologist, to her future fiance, Brad Hoenig, in the spring of 2004.

And as things were heating up between the couple, Mr. Dubin also found Mr. Hoenig, who was his client, a 1,500-square-foot two-bedroom duplex at the top of the Paladin on the Upper East Side.

Mr. Hoenig, 31, an investment banker, closed on the apartment for $1.325 million in June, and the couple were engaged three months later.

“Its one-stop shopping,” Ms. Kleeblatt said, surrounded by stunning northern, western and southern exposures in the couple’s new dining room, which was graced by a framed line drawing of the late rocker Kurt Cobain done by Mr. Hoenig. “David knows us so well,” she said. “He said Brad would fit in with my family, and it’s so true.”

Found in many cultures, traditional matchmakers were people who had encyclopedic knowledge of the eligible young people in a community along with their family backgrounds and social standings. Today’s real estate agents and brokers, with huge rosters of single clients and intimate knowledge of their finances and lifestyles, would seem equally suited to take up that role.

And some of them are doing just that. Agents and brokers say they want to help out ambitious unattached professionals who have little time to seek out romance. Others say they handle real estate transactions for a large number of divorced or divorcing clients, who need to find a new home for their belongings and sometimes a new partner.

(snip)

Michael Wilens, 34, a lawyer, went to contract two months ago on a town house in the East 50’s, and his broker, Ms. Forbes, felt that his investment in property demonstrated he was primed to make an investment in love. While a well-to-do bachelor seeking a loft downtown may not want to settle down, one seeking a town house with space for a family to grow may be contemplating change, Ms. Forbes said.

“He was always sort of a dater, but the day he signed the contract, I said to him, ‘Now that you’ve found the house, I think you’re ready for a wife.’ He said fine, and I said, ‘I have the perfect girl for you.’ “

I think this was the cringey clincher for me:

Even when the matches fall short, some clients of real estate brokers say they are grateful for the service. The first woman Ms. Morgenstern presented to a 26-year-old client, Jamie Schweid, fell through romantically. Mr. Schweid has begun his second round of dating with another of Ms. Morgenstern’s clients. Even if this match doesn’t work, he said, he appreciates the efforts of his agent.

“If you trust a broker to look at your financials to do a board package, which is a very intrusive process, they can set you up with a girl,” said Mr. Schweid, who is a vice president for a ground beef manufacturer.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s wit is widely admired, and now it has been quantified. He is, a new study concludes, 19 times as funny as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

(snip)

Justice Scalia was the funniest justice, at 77 “laughing episodes.” On average, he was good for slightly more than one laugh – 1.027, to be precise – per argument.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer was next, at 45 laughs. Justice Ginsburg produced but four laughs. Justice Clarence Thomas, who rarely speaks during arguments, gave rise to no laughter at all.

Of course, what passes for humor at the Supreme Court would probably not kill at the local comedy club. Consider, for instance, the golden opportunity on Halloween this year when a light bulb in the courtroom’s ceiling exploded during an argument.

It takes two justices, it turns out, to screw up a light bulb joke.

“It’s a trick they play on new chief justices all the time,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who joined the court that month, said of the explosion.

“[Laughter.]”

“Happy Halloween,” Justice Scalia retorted.

“[Laughter.]”

And then, the kicker. “We’re even more in the dark now than before,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

“[Laughter.]”

Please! Stop! No more! You’re… killing… me!

Professor Wexler concedes that his methodology is imperfect. The court reporters who insert the notations may, for instance, be unreliable or biased.

The simple notation “[laughter]” does not, moreover, distinguish between “a series of small chuckles” and “a joke that brought the house down.” Nor, Professor Wexler said, does it separate “the genuine laughter brought about by truly funny or clever humor and the anxious kind of laughter that arises when one feels nervous or uncomfortable or just plain scared for the nation’s future.”

(snip)

Sometimes, the laughter that apparently filled the courtroom is hard to comprehend. Chief Justice Roberts, for instance, got a laugh for this observation at an October argument on assisted suicide: “The relationship between the states and the federal government has changed a little since Gibbons v. Ogden,” a landmark decision in 1824 about national regulation of the economy.

This week’s quote is from the book I’ve almost finished – Dead Lines, by Greg Bear, one of my favorite sci-fi authors:

I finally figured it out. This world is awful – it’s bad art…. There’s something underneath, something wonderful and full of color. It’s happy and it makes sense. I can feel it. Some hifalutin, cruel god has painted over an ancient masterpiece filled with joy.

Hopefully I’ll get around to blogging a little more on Dead Lines, but for now, suffice it to say that it’s more supernatural than sci-fi, and it goes from aimlessly creepy to Holy Shit! in the span of about five pages.

And, of course, there’ll be other people’s lizards…

I’m pretty sure Spike doesn’t like me. I know I’ve seen that glare before, but I just… can’t… quite…

I also adequately fulfilled my goal of taking a whole bunch of NYC photos. Final tally somewhere in the vicinity of 420 to 430. It took me about 80 shots just to get out of Columbus Circle. Here’s the first batch of photos from said aforementioned Circle.

Ceci n’est pas les pipes.

This one is pretty cool as long as you don’t look closely enough to notice that none of it is actually in focus…

So I was reading this NYT article about the battle for high-definition DVD supremacy between Blu-Ray (a consortium led by Sony) and HD-DVD (led by Toshiba, and endorsed by Microsoft and Intel), and how the longer it goes on, the worse it will be for the winner. And the thought that came to my mind was, When was the last time Sony ever picked a winner, format-wise? This is the company that backed Betamax, Minidisc, and Memory Stick, all of which became little niche technologies that are only used with Sony products. They’re not necessarily bad or inferior, they just never caught on outside the Sonyverse.

So if you’re placing bets or investments, my recommendation is to pick the team that has Microsoft and Intel on board.

I don’t really have any other point to make here, I just wanted to bash Sony for their inability to create standards.

Well, I made it to the airport, with my giant 800-lb. bag full of books. Agggh. Next year everyone gets helium.

As the bus neared the airport, it passed a sign for the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. It occurred to me that PANG might even be a cooler Air National Guard abbreviation than TANG, which then got me to thinking about some of the other possibilities and permutations.

I know all of us in Liberallandia are eagerly awaiting Abramonukkah, when America’s Dirtiest Lobbyist That Anyone’s Heard Of rats out everyone he dodgily paid off – but what I’m thinking about now is what happens next. Just how many Republicans is he going to finger, and how will they react? Will they resign in tearful disgrace a la “Duke” Cunningham? Will they serve out their term but decline to run for re-election? Or will they try to bluster and brazen it out like Tom DeLay?

Here’s my thinking: That it will come down to two factors, which have nothing to do with character or principle (the fingerees will have neither). I believe that if they’re in a state with a Republican governor, they will resign, or be quietly pressured to do so, so the Republican governor can appoint a less obviously tainted replacement to serve out their term and benefit from some sliver of incumbency in 2006. Otherwise, I think they’ll either step aside for re-election or try to brazen it out, based on just how solidly and irrationally red they believe their state or district to be. Again, I suspect the Republican party might be whispering in some ears that now is the time for all dodgy men to take a dive for the party. Better an (apparently) untainted unknown than a name-brand criminal.

But regardless of the Republican strategy, if Abramonukkah produces mass indictments, it’s going to weaken Republican election prospects terribly in 2006 and possibly 2008. Which brings me to my next thought: What would happen if a Democrat gets elected in 2008, and the imperial presidency has not been dismantled?

Naturally, the Republicans and their creatures would go into full froth about the evils of unchecked government power, and demand that those powers be pared back – for the good of the Republic, of course. So here’s my thoroughly impractical, naive, and optimistic thought: The Democrats should graciously accede to these demands because, in point of fact, a super-powerful executive is bad for the Republic. But on one condition: that all the Republicans sign statements swearing their undying opposition to unchecked presidential power (especially in times of war, when it is most tempting), and vowing to either oppose it or resign (or at least not seek re-election), regardless of which party seeks to wield it. Hell, all the Democrats should sign them too, just for good measure.

Do I think any of them would actually abide by those statements? Not really, no. But it would raise the stakes of their hypocrisy, and give the Democrats something concrete to wave in their faces the next time they cravenly enable a power-mad Republican president. It would be concrete proof of their fundamental self-serving dishonesty, and carry more weight than recycled quotes (i.e., Republicans expressing opposition to Clinton’s police action in Kosovo). Sure, they’d lie and spin about how the ability to arrest and detain someone indefinitely for “looking like a terrorist” isn’t really an expansion of executive power, but I don’t think too many people would buy it.

Of course, I can’t really imagine this happening, but I’m desperate for some way to hold the Republicans accountable for their peekaboo principles. I’m sure there are lots of better ways, but I can’t think of any, not when the media is solidly in the tank for the Republicans, and the blogosphere is barely a blip on most people’s radar.

Well, I’ve been tagged by Phila,NTodd, and scout prime to answer these seven-y things, and I have no idea what I’m going to say. So I’ll just start typing and hope some magic happens…

Seven Things To Do Before I Die

1. Orbit the Earth
2. Wave at Bush, Cheney, and Rove as they’re frogmarched to the hoosegow.
3. Piss on Bush, Cheney, and Rove’s graves.
4. Get a front-row seat to President Bootsie Collins’ inaugural address.
5. Hit for the cycle.
6. Learn to make a really killer avocado milkshake.
7. Be a zombie extra in a Sci-Fi Saturday horror movie.

Seven Things I Cannot Do

1. Learn a dance step.
2. Get blogrolled by Atrios.
3. Pay a lot for this muffler.
4. Get to bed on time.
5. Laugh at Howard Stern.
6. Win the lottery.
7. Get my shit organized.

4. The need to spew random thoughts into the air.
5. Sense of community.
6. Delusional vanity.
7. The hope that I might someday come up with an idea that helps the Democratic party turn itself around and start kicking some ass. (See: Vanity, delusional.)

Atrios has linked to a couple of excellent but pessimistic posts by Peter Daou, in which he deconstructs the reasons why liberals and Democrats have been so ineffective in countering Republicans in general, and how they will fail to make the latest NSA spying scandal stick in particular.

On the whole, I think he is disturbingly accurate about the disconnect between the out-of-touch, don’t-rock-the-boat Democratic party establishment and the eloquent, and passionate liberal netroots, but it seems to me that he overlooks one very important fact: The law doesn’t care. Fitzgerald doesn’t care. The Republicans and their media allies can lie and spin all they want, but they can’t make indictments go away, and they’re piling up. “Duke” Cunningham’s already fessed up and resigned. DeLay, Libby, possibly Frist, possibly a whole mess of congresscritters on Abramoff’s payroll, are all under indictment now or in the near future. Even a wholly corporate-owned media can’t bury that, much less prevent it. And that will be a drag on Republican attempts to further consolidate their power in the 2006 and 2008 elections – especially those candidates who are indicted or otherwise tainted by scandal.

Indeed, Daou himself makes this remarkable statement about this latest outrage:

The story starts blending into a long string of administration scandals, and through skillful use of scandal fatigue, Bush weathers the storm and moves on, further demoralizing his opponents and cementing the press narrative about his ‘resolve’ and toughness.

When a party’s strategy is to “blend” new scandals in with a steaming pile of other scandals, I think it’s safe to say they could be in some serious electoral jeopardy, especially at the state and local level. For while that approach may be successful at the national level, I am fairly certain that the voters in indictees’ states and districts will echo Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinnie: “Oh yeah. You blend.”

This leaves only the president, who, if I understand the process correctly, can only be brought to trial via the impeachment process, which is really quite extraordinary – imagine a murder suspect who has confessed, but can only be indicted if his enemies outvote his friends. Also, what happens if the FOIA succeeds and the NSA is forced to release their list of wiretappees, and one or more of them decide to sue? Could they sue the president, or only the federal government in general? Could Bush face criminal charges when he leaves office? Can any law-talkin’ folks help me out here?

In any case, even if there is no impeachment, Bush is still gone in 2009. And if a wave of scandals washes away a whole bunch of Republican reps and senators in 2006, then Bush’s reign of terror is effectively over, which is a very important short-term goal.

PRACTITIONERS of the oldest profession have been found at work on the icy shores of Antarctica plying their trade in a dress of black and white feathers – they are penguin prostitutes.

(snip)

Stones are so valuable that they will steal them from each other, though they risk being attacked by the owners of the hard currency. In the journal Auk, Drs Hunter and Davis describe how females have developed another strategy: they lure nearby male penguins for sex in exchange for the rocks. “Females have figured out that one way to steal the stones without being attacked is to swap copulations for them,” said Dr Hunter.

They slip away from their partner and wander over to the nest of an unpaired male. Standard courtship follows, with a dip of the head and a coy look from the corner of her eye. If he shows interest, she will lie prone which, in the language of penguin love, is an invitation to mate or carry out what the scientists call “extra-pair copulation”.

Once mating is over, the female picks up her payment, a stone, and carries it to her nesting platform. Sometimes their customers are so satisfied that the females can return for second helpings of stones, without having to offer more sex. Other females found that a little courtship was enough to persuade a male to allow them to play with a rock, then cart it away. One especially teasing female managed to collect 62 stones this way, said Dr Hunter. “The males were probably duped into thinking that she was a possible partner.”

Coming soon, the can’t-miss documentary film Streetwalk Of The Penguins will document all the sordid goings-on in the northern-light district.

But how much longer will the Bushies be able to get away with trashing the law and the Constitution while insisting, “No, we’re buds; it’s totally cool”? The gap between the law and their actions is growing ever larger and more obvious. How long before they start hinting that the law is actually a hindrance in the War On Terror, holding Bush and his Grimly Determined Manly Men back from the dirty tricks that are oh-so-sadly necessary to protect us from Osama and his Scary Vampire Ninjas? Has it started already? Will the Democrats resist? Are there enough principled Republicans or outraged voters for resistance to succeed? Barbara Boxer has made a good start, but she needs backup.

Okay, lookit. Bush isn’t the first awful president we’ve had, and he won’t be the last. Even great presidents make the occasional stupid decision. But no president has ever made such a determined effort to place himself above the law, and above the Constitution and its carefully calibrated balance of power. FDR was close, but he was a good president, fighting an actual, real, declared war. I’m not trying to excuse or overlook FDR putting Japanese-Americans in camps or stacking the judiciary, but rather to point out that untrammelled executive power magnifies presidential incompetence, hubris, and outright evil. And it has been abundantly clear for several years that Bush is just about the last president that should be trusted with untrammelled executive power.

Of course, ultimately, the question is “What can be done?” One of Bush’s biggest advantages throughout his five years of misrule has been a supportive, or at least compliant, press corps. They have underreported or overexcused his myriad failures and outright crimes, and shirked their duty to uncover the facts, or even to remember them. As long as their corporate owners enjoy a symbiotic relationship with Bush and the Republican party, this is unlikely to change. But if enough people realize the extent of their duplicity, their credibility will be sorely damaged, and their effectiveness will be crippled. Right-wing accusations of “liberal media bias” will be laughed off, and their attempts to peddle administration spin will be dismissed as the propaganda it is (“Well, of course Pravda thinks Stalin is a wise and compassionate leader…”). Unfortunately, this is not happening any time soon, if at all. And while the blogosphere is a great alternate source of information, its small audience limits it to the role of a whisper factory, generating a subliminal buzz that occasionally leaps into the zeitgeist – usually by way of the corporate media trying to swaddle itself in borrowed hipness or credibility.

The next big problem is the Congress. Not only do Republican loyalists hold a majority in both houses, but the Congressional Democrats’ opposition is fitful and inconsistent, often sabotaged by their own members (I’m looking at you, Senators Named Joe). They’ve been doing a better job of hammering home the Corrupt-Republicans narrative, which is excellent and extremely apt, but they also need to address Bush’s Constitution-shredding head-on. As I said before, Senator Boxer has made a good start at moving the ball on illegality and impeachability, but there is an additional strategy I would like to see them employ, one which might actually force Bush and the Republicans to do something constructive for a change.

As I observed over the weekend, Bush’s claim that he had to take extraordinary measures to fight terror is at odds with his resolute unwillingness to take ordinary measures against terror. I want to see the Democrats call him on this, and demand to know why, if he’s so dedicated to the war on terror, he’s opposed to legislation that would require ports or chemical or nuclear plants to improve their security. Why he doesn’t want to force freight companies to route trains with hazardous chemicals away from major cities. Why he’s not demanding that Congress stop treating homeland security funds like just another flavor of pork. Why he’s not full-on, hair-on-fire, pedal-to-the-heavy-metal committed to, nay, obsessed with, the effort to secure Russia’s loose nuclear material and warheads. This approach would expose the hypocrisy and incompetence at the heart of Bush’s “War On Terror”, and remind everyone that paranoia does not equal safety. Sure, there will always be diehards who come up with excuses, but this discrepancy would be very hard to explain away. And who knows? It might even shame the Republicans into doing the right thing for a change.

I’ll just touch briefly on my other personal hot-button topic, electoral reform. I still think this is vital and essential to an accountable, and therefore healthy democracy, but if BushCo continues to trample on the Constitution and generally act like power-hungry idiots, they may face a groundswell of voter opposition that voter suppression and Diebold dodginess can’t conceal. Even so, people have short memories, and the Republicans are masters at whipping up their base and scaring everyone else with imaginary menaces like immigrants and gay marriage, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. And the latest revelations about Diebold hackability coming out of Florida make this a very opportune time to step up the fight for paper trails on all electronic voting machines. After all, how can Republicans credibly argue that there’s no real need for them, when the machines can be compromised so easily?

Bush has given the Democrats all kinds of leverage to use against him, and even with all his fuckups, they’re still going to need to use every bit of it if they want to start winning elections with any kind of consistency. Well, that and getting rid of Shrum and Brazile, although I fear they may be harder to kill than Rasputin.

With Democrats and Republicans alike questioning whether President Bush had the legal authority to approve the program, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argued that Congress had essentially given Bush broad powers to order the domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

“Our position is that the authorization to use military force which was passed by the Congress shortly after Sept. 11 constitutes that authority,” said Gonzales.

Domestic surveillance is the same thing as military force???

Oh well, I suppose we should be grateful that Bush limited himself to eavesdropping rather than full-blown home invasions. Can I have America back now, please?

I haven’t blogged about the horrifying revelation that President Bush has gleefully authorized illegal wiretaps, and justified it with the “I will do whatever it takes to protect this country” defense, because my fellow liberal bloggers have been doing a far better job of it than I possibly ever could. However, there is one aspect of it that I haven’t seen addressed, and that is the discrepancy between the level of anti-terrorism commitment the Administration pretends to have, vs. the level of commitment they’ve actually demonstrated thus far.

Bush claims that the War On Terror is so important that he has to break the law in order to wage it effectively. But if that’s true, why hasn’t he put his foot down that Homeland Security funds be allocated on the basis of need, and not used for air-conditioned garbage trucks or police dog body armor? Why doesn’t he buck the nuclear and chemical industries to force them to improve their plant security? Why has he ignored all the recommendations of the 9/11 Committee?

As with torture, it looks as though Bush and the Republicans are only interested in “anti-terror” methods if they are illegal. For me, it begs the question: Is preventing terror attacks the end which justifies the means of violating individual rights, or are those violations an end unto themselves?

A senior scholar at the Cato Institute, the respected libertarian research organization, has resigned after revelations that he took payments from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing columns favorable to his clients.

The scholar, Doug Bandow, who wrote a column for the Copley News Service in addition to serving as a Cato fellow, acknowledged to executives at the organization that he had taken money from Mr. Abramoff after he was confronted about the payments by a reporter from BusinessWeek Online.

“He acknowledges he made a lapse in judgment,” said Jamie Dettmer, director of communications at Cato. “There’s a lot of sadness here.”

(snip)

Mr. Bandow did not take government money, but the source of his payments – around $2,000 an article – is no less controversial. His sometime sponsor, Mr. Abramoff, is at the center of a far-reaching criminal corruption investigation involving several members of Congress, with prosecutors examining whether he sought to bribe lawmakers in exchange for legislative help.

A second scholar, Peter Ferrara, of the Institute for Policy Innovation, acknowledged in the same BusinessWeek Online piece that he had also taken money from Mr. Abramoff in exchange for writing certain opinion articles. But Mr. Ferrara did not apologize for doing so. “I do that all the time,” Mr. Ferrara was quoted as saying….

At Cato and similar institutions, adjunct scholars are not always prohibited from accepting outside consulting roles. But at Cato, said Mr. Dettmer, and at the American Enterprise Institute, said a spokeswoman there, rules require scholars to make public all their affiliations, and there is an expectation that scholars will not embarrass the institution.

At what point does the media lose all credibility? Or at least lose their laughable reputation as liberally biased?

(Abramoff, Abramoff… That name sounds so familiar… Truly a man of varied and dizzying talents.)

That’s former Bill Clinton political guru Dick Morris… getting star billing on the state of Connecticut’s Top 100 Delinquent Taxpayer Accounts. According to the Nutmeg State’s official Web site, Morris is the eighth-biggest scofflaw, owing $259,154.41 in income taxes as of Nov. 1. Morris didn’t respond by deadline to Lowdown’s request for an explanation.

It’s so refreshing to see a Republican actively taking part in the War On Taxes instead of just sitting on his ass and letting the government fight his battles for him.

This is a rather disturbing/depressing story. This Manhattan woman’s cat, Oliver, escaped, was turned over to a shelter, and promptly adopted by someone else, who refuses to give him back. And according to a rather vague 1894 statute, “a pet owner’s right to reclaim a lost pet is terminated if the animal is not claimed within 48 hours of being seized by an authorized city agency.” So now she has to battle it out in court to get her beloved kitty back. I can’t even imagine how much that would suck.

My thoughts:

o Oliver’s new owner is a jerk. Yes, she has a legal claim to keep the cat, but for all intents and purposes she has stolen or kidnapped him, and her argument is basically, “Hey, you shouldn’t have let him escape – once he gets out, he’s fair game.” But even if the new owner has indeed bonded with him, Oliver’s previous owner should have a stronger claim, unless she was abusive or negligent. Also, consider how cats (and pets in general) are like family for a lot of people. Imagine if your child wandered off one day, the stranger who found him decided to keep him or her, and then argued that you lost the kid because you’re a lousy parent.

UPDATE: The NY Daily News covered this story as well, and notes that the first owner had Oliver for four years, while the new owner had him for ONE WEEK before deciding to keep him. I’m going to amend my intial assessment from “jerk” to “completely fucking selfish and evil.”

o Didn’t Oliver have a nametag with his owner’s contact information? If so, why didn’t the shelter or the person who found him attempt to contact his owner? If he didn’t (it doesn’t look like he has one in the photo accompanying the article), why the hell not??? I wouldn’t go so far as to say she deserves to lose her cat because she didn’t give him a nametag, but she was certainly tempting fate. If I’m the new owner or her lawyer, I would make that front and center in any claims of negligence (the new owner is claiming negligence, but she appears to be using the escape itself as her evidentiary trump card).

o If you have cats or dogs, give them nametags. Hell, give them those tracer chip implants if you can. And if it doesn’t exist already, there should be some kind of central lost-pet registry where all the shelters log brief descriptions of any animals they receive, as well as when and where they were found. So if you lose your pet, you can just check the registry rather than going from shelter to shelter. Somehow, I suspect that this will never happen…

After months of resistance, the White House has agreed to accept Sen. John McCain’s call for a law specifically banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of foreign suspects in the war on terror, several congressional officials said Thursday.

(snip)

These officials also cautioned the agreement was encountering opposition in the House from Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

The White House at one point threatened a veto if the ban was included in legislation sent to his desk, and Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to all Republican senators to give an exemption to the CIA.

But congressional sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of the ban, and McCain, who was held and tortured for five years in Vietnam, adopted the issue.

He and the administration have been negotiating for weeks in search of a compromise, but it became increasingly clear that he, not the administration, had the votes in Congress.

Yet another Profiles In Courage moment for BushCo. Too bad it looks like there are still some Congressional Republicans who just can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet torture. Or “coercive interrogation”, or whateve the hell the euphemism of choice is these days. I’m just going to continue calling it what they’d call it if someone did it to their kids.

From today’s NYT article about the uncertainty (to put it mildly) about whether Iraq will be able to follow Bush’s roadmap to a successful, independent, relatively occupation-free government:

Participants in some of the briefings he has received in the Situation Room in recent weeks say that acknowledgment is in keeping with the far more somber tone of the briefings. Military commanders have described possible situations that range from the best case – drawing American troops down to about 100,000 before the American elections in November – to keeping them at far higher numbers if the new Parliament turns to chaos, civil war threatens, or political leaders are assassinated.

Wow. So, basically, the “best case” in Iraq is one that helps the Republicans get votes in 2006. Interesting criteria for military decision-making.

have got to be outstanding, so you see I cant mess around with anything that might hurt them. Forgive me, but youre all like kinfolk from a distance, from a time we dont talk about, but its on my mind. Theyre why I need your help. Be clearer, Jason. The Jackals closing in. He found us in Hong Kong and hes zeroing in on me and my family, on my wife and my children. Please, help me. The old mans eyes grew wide under the green shade, a moral fury in his expanded pupils. Does the good doctor know about this? Hes part of it. He may not approve of what Im doing, but if hes honest with himself, he knows that the bottom line is the Jackal and me. Help me, Cactus. The aged black studied his pleading client in the hallway, in the

The spammers really should start stringing these excerpts together into a coherent narrative. If it’s compelling enough, then people will keep opening their spam to see how the story turns out. Everybody wins!

All I ask for my genius idea is a mere 1 cent per spam e-mail. And lifetime “spammunity”.